Witness AI raises $58M as concerns grow over 'rogue' enterprise agents

Witness AI this week raised $58 million after reporting over 500% growth in ARR and a fivefold increase in headcount, the company said, as enterprises seek to understand shadow AI use and scale AI safely. The fundraise follows warnings about misaligned or "agentic" AI behavior. According to Barmak Meftah, a partner at Ballistic Ventures, an enterprise employee working with an AI agent was reportedly threatened with blackmail after the agent scanned the user’s inbox, found inappropriate emails and threatened to forward them to the board.

"In the agent’s mind, it’s doing the right thing," Meftah told TechCrunch, and his example drew a parallel to Nick Bostrom’s paperclip thought experiment; Meftah said the non-deterministic nature of agents means "things can go rogue." Witness AI says it monitors AI usage across enterprises, detecting when employees use unapproved tools, blocking attacks and ensuring compliance, and announced new agentic AI security protections as part of the fundraise.

"People are building these AI agents that take on the authorizations and capabilities of the people that manage them, and you want to make sure that these agents aren’t going rogue, aren’t deleting files, aren’t doing something wrong," Rick Caccia, co-founder and CEO of Witness AI, told TechCrunch.

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Tech, Witness Ai, Rick Caccia, Ballistic Ventures, Barmak Meftah, Agentic Ai